V-Wars

She hadn’t turned around yet. “Well, something sure is moving out by McFall’s barn.”



Artus wondered if Billy would be able to hook down off the eaves and sling himself in through one of the upstairs windows. He strained his ears for footsteps, and there they were — just over the boys’ bedroom, unoccupied since they’d grown and moved away, nothing in there but some cardboard boxes and a few clothes in the closet. The window would likely be open, circulating air to fight off the autumn dampness.



Artus was about to head on up to the hall, planning to wait just outside the bedroom door, when he heard the second set of feet on the tin.



“A couple more in the cornfield,” Betty Ann said, with a strange calmness, like she was watching television. “Ravens like corn, don’t they?”



Artus didn’t tolerate an uppity wife, but at the moment he was too distracted by these goddamned Injuns trying to get in the house. It wasn’t his fault Daniel Boone and his ilk had taken over the mountains and driven the Cherokee west. And he’d never held a personal grudge against any of them, as long as they kept to their hardscrabble corner of the county.



But the Standingdeers didn’t.



Billy Standingdeer had dated an Aldridge woman, and although the Aldridge family had fallen from grace since Prohibition and the days of moonshine, they were still white and local, two traits that people didn’t like to see mixed with Cherokee blood. And a couple of his brothers had even taken a notion to enroll at the community college.



But they still held to their native customs, at least during the annual Trade Days, when the county historical association set up a festival in Melvin Eggers’ cow pasture and brought the past alive. Some Cherokee dressed in their buckskins and feathers, performing rain dances for ten bucks an hour, and Billy Standingdeer was among them.



The festival also included storytelling, which was where Artus and Betty Ann had heard the Raven Mocker legend. It had been told by Granny Standingdeer herself, who looked old enough to have been cutting teeth while the world was born. Not that she had any teeth left now.



Legend or no legend, Artus didn’t take kindly to people traipsing around on his roof. And whatever the Injun had been up to out in the McFall barn, that didn’t mean any of those others had turned.



“Are they coming any closer?” he said, reluctant now to make the journey up the stairs. Even with the shotgun, he didn’t feel so confident.



“One of them’s down by the fence,” she said. “I can see the porch light reflected in his eyes.”



Artus kept a pistol in the bedside table, but it was upstairs. He had a .22 in the hall closet for hunting squirrels, and he’d shown Betty Ann how to point and shoot it, even though she didn’t have much knack for marksmanship. Still, until he figured out what they were dealing with, a little extra firepower probably wouldn’t hurt.



“Get the rifle out of the closet,” he said, moving a few steps up the stairs. “Bullets are on the top shelf. You remember how to load it.”



“I ain’t shooting nobody,” she said.



“It’s just Injuns,” he said.



“They’re still coming.”



“Would you shoot if they was vampires?” he said, taking another two slow steps up the stairs.



“Depends on if they was trying to drink my blood.”



“And the Raven Mocker will eat your heart. Amounts to the same thing.”



She was moving now. He couldn’t see her, because he was near the top of the stairs, but he heard the closet door squeak open. The two pairs of feet above danced their metallic hoedown across the tin.



Artus reached the landing and tried the light switch. The government had cut the phone service but at least the power was still on. He wasn’t sure whether the infection was the work of the government. He couldn’t see the sense of it, unless they were just trying to scare honest taxpayers. But he had a feeling old Billy Standingdeer didn’t give a hoot about taxes.



The door to the boys’ room was ten feet straight ahead. The footsteps on the roof had stopped, but the wind had picked up, making it difficult to hear any unusual noises as the house creaked and groaned.



“You okay, honey?” he whispered down the stairs.



“Never been better,” she said.



It was the same thing she’d said on their honeymoon, after he’d made an awful mess of things and she’d cried a little.



“Any more of them out there?”



“Sky’s black as tar,” she said. “If they’s any ravens flying around up there, I can’t see them.”



Artus couldn’t tell if she was joshing him or not. She didn’t seem as scared as he was. But she hadn’t seen Billy Standingdeer in the barn, grinning like a crazed fool and looking like he enjoyed the taste of the blood on his lips. And those eyes, with their red fire glinting in the lantern light …



Screw Billy and his whole heart-stealing tribe. I got a little twelve-gauge peace pipe for him right here.



Artus tiptoed down the hall, his heart hammering. He tried not to think of what that Jap on the TV had said about vampires.



If he’s a vampire, don’t you need silver bullets or sharpened wooden crosses or something?



But he didn’t believe in vampires. Here in the Southern Appalachians, the Raven Mocker was the thing you had to worry about. That and the government.



The door was in front of him. Unlocked. All he had to do was reach out and turn the handle.



But he couldn’t do it.



He heard more footsteps, but even over the noise of the wind in the trees, these didn’t sound like they were walking across tin. No, they sounded like they were walking on wood.



The door rattled in its frame.



Gotta be the wind. The window must be open.



Then the doorknob turned, and it seemed like the house shivered a little against the autumn breeze.



He couldn’t even turn, much less run, and his legs felt like knotty locust posts sunk in rocky soil. The shotgun grew heavy in his hands, and his lungs were dry and tight. His heart pushed frantically against his scrawny ribs.



The door swung inwards and the widening crack revealed only darkness.



He tried to recall Granny Standingdeer’s stories from Trade Days, because there was a way to defeat the Raven Mocker. She said only medicine men could kill them, but what else did he expect her to say? A white man with a law degree?



But didn’t a shotgun count as medicine? Artus would take the weapon over mumbo jumbo and owl feathers.



Granny said the Raven Mocker came to the house of the weak and stole their remaining days by stealing the heart. Artus, with his high blood pressure and diabetes, didn’t think he had all that many years left, but he sure as hell wasn’t going to give them up without a fight.



The door swung open another inch, and the house shook with a sudden surge of wind. Shutters flapped and a loose piece of tin spawned a rusty scream.



He wondered if the things outside — Raven Mockers, vampires, or just plain old Injuns — were moving closer, and if Betty Ann had the gumption to fend them off if they got too close. He didn’t think so. Having a mousy wife had been fun in the beginning, when he laid down the law and she followed or got a quick rap to the kidneys if she needed a lesson. In a way, women were like Injuns, always wanting a little more than they were due, or else expecting equal treatment when they surely didn’t deserve it.



But this one coming out of the bedroom was going to learn his place, or get blown back to hell.



The door opened another couple of inches, and Artus lifted the barrel of the shotgun. It seemed heavier, and his heart thudded and spasmed in his chest. He took a deep breath to steady his hand but it didn’t work.



With the October night ripping itself to life, as if the mountains had opened and let loose the old gods, the floor shook beneath Artus’s boots. The lights flickered, and his heart skipped a beat.



If the goddamned government decides to cut the power—



His finger tightened against the twin triggers. If the place went dark, he was letting loose with a bee’s-nest worth of buckshot, and whatever was behind the door would be spattered across the room like a busted bag of soup.



The door opened six inches and a hand appeared, the reddish-brown fingers appearing ordinary aside from the black dirt under the scabby nails.



Do it, you old fool. Shoot.



But part of him was curious, wanted to see what the Injun had become. After the encounter in the barn, Artus now had a hard time believing what he’d really seen. Maybe it was just a bunch of migrant Mexicans from the Christmas tree farms, passed out from cheap wine and wacky weed. And maybe Billy Standingdeer was their drug dealer, dishing out powders from his medicine bag.



But that didn’t explain the blood.



Artus felt the cold, firm nudge to his back just as the door swung open wide. The pain in his kidney rivaled the one in his chest, and the shotgun felt as if it were a soggy old piece of oak timber, heavy and useless.



And Billy stood there, pupils black as a bird’s but the sclera shot through with scarlet, and his mouth was cracked into the crooked wedge of a smile. And there was them two long teeth again.



But Artus couldn’t focus, because of the thing jabbing him in the back. As mesmerizing as Billy’s appearance was, Artus turned his withered neck to glance behind him.



Betty Ann was pressing the .22 against him, her face set in a grim line. He’d never noticed before, but she had blue eyes, and they seemed cold as deep winter and hard as graveyard ice.



“Buh-Betty?” he murmured, confused. He shifted his gaze back to Billy Standingdeer, whose skin seemed to darken even as he stepped into the light of the hallway. But it was his eyes that were the creepiest, the sockets filled with purest black and red, not a sliver of white showing.



Raise the gun, you old fool—



But his arms were like damp ropes, and he couldn’t even get it high enough to blow off Billy’s kneecaps and stop him in his tracks.



“Shoot him,” he grunted, hoping Betty Ann had more strength and willpower than he did, even though he’d always been the protector. The man of the house. The one who laid down the law.